_ I don’t train because I enjoy being abused or emasculated. In fact, I don’t enjoy being abused or ridiculed at all, not even ‘in the name of progress’. Maybe this is why I generally train by myself these days. It’s a strange and sad state, when our normal expectation of the personal training experience is to berate or be berated. Any moron can tell someone to do it harder, and just because you’re Drillseargent McYellface doesn’t make you good at progression or athletic advancement. In fact, it probably makes you worse. If you’re actually in the army, and you need to be combat-ready – there are different processes they take you through. You need to learn about managing stress in a whole different way. Bootcamps aren’t about getting you fit – it’s the army – they assume you’re already fit. Bootcamps are about team building, learning to trust and rely on the other people who will keep you alive when death is on the cards. The modern civilian bootcamp is an abomination.

_ Too judgmental? Maybe I’m wrong, many people seem to enjoy them. But the injury rates aren’t in their favour, and most instructors don’t seem to pay much attention to technique or progression in anything other than a vague cardiovascular fat-loss-seeking sense. If you can’t inspire someone to develop by any means other than exploiting their fears and yelling verbal abuse, do you really have what it takes to be a <insert whatever you want to be here>? Maybe. Who knows? Why should we have to push it harder, all the time? In competition, we bust our ass to excel. But training is different from competing – what happens if you bust your ass every time you set foot in the gym? Sooner or later you’ll break. Oh, but you have to work as hard as you can, so you can burn the most calories... Bullshit. The number of calories burned is the least important aspect of fitness. Again, we have it ass-backwards – you don’t train to negate the food you ate, you eat to enable growth and development. Well, actually you eat because you’re alive and you need to eat, but y’know - food is not the enemy. We all have to eat. Food is your friend, and eating is supposed to be a good experience. Why is it normal to look down and wish you were shaped different? Normal should be to look down and think, this is me, I rock. Again – it’s all backwards. So how do you optimise your training for progression? Do stuff you like (remember if you play a recreational sport, it’s supposed to be fun), that challenges you enough to satisfy, but not so much that you get overwhelmed and you start dreading the gym. If you like structure, you can try periodising your training – one week out of every month, go hard as you can. Next week do next to nothing, and the other two weeks are spent building up to the next badass week. That can work really well. You can build up your enthusiasm, confident in the knowledge that you’re not going to burn yourself out. It’s probably only a few times a month that I do a max effort, heavy low-rep set of any given exercise, and most of them happen within one half of any given month. I don’t know, I’m not tracking it super closely at the moment. Otherwise my training time is spent doing range of motion stuff, building up to heavy intense work, or just playing around. There’s been a lot of playing around without structure lately, which is why I haven’t been taking notes. Usually I like recording my heavy lifts for future reference. I certainly don’t write down everything I do in the gym, but if I record my main lifts, I find it useful. Again, I’m guided by what I find useful or rewarding. We have a way of neglecting methods of training that we think won’t help change the shape of our bodies. This does not represent that your training is motivated by a genuine desire to develop your health, but for whatever reason, we’re drawn to what we’re drawn to, and we find other methods and exercises distasteful. Try to keep an open mind, and think about what might be good for your body and mind, even if it won’t make you thin, ripped or more muscular. Pay attention, develop your focus and awareness, bring yourself to it and see what you find satisfying. Give exercise a chance to be fulfilling. Pain is a sign that something’s wrong, but somehow in fitness, we forget that’s the case. As your strength and conditioning develops, so too will your capacity for hard work. Don’t worry if someone else thinks ‘you should be working harder’. You push it as hard as you want to push it, not as hard as you can, and if efficiency and freedom of movement is important to you, you’ll invest in relaxation as much as you do in tension. Feel your muscles, feel your joints, investigate – how’s your alignment? What’s fatiguing? How do you feel? Having said all that, you know my prevailing opinion – train what you want to work on, in your own way, whatever that is and don’t take any shit about it from anyone.

For someone who's been in the Army (true story), there's a couple of learnings from their approach:

- Personally, I find strong "army style" 'self talk' to be an excellent self motivator. Especially on those days that it's raining, or cold, or you just need to get up that hill. That self talk? Typically in my head will sound like a Corporal from my basic training days. Same same purpose.

- The Army has PTi's (Physical Training Instructor). These guys and gals are at the Top Of Their Game. They're the red shirted, short shorted, demons of the ADF that you could apply to almost any physical discipline or challenge and they'll take a bite and ask for more. Their role, especially for the newcomers, is to ensure exercise is done right, not just for the sake of fitness or endurance.

- The Army across the board has a model for fitness standards, which all soldiers must maintain, and are tested against xx times per year. It's a scale that differs for sex and age, but not rank or role. It's quite a good measure I found, and motivation to maintain ones fitness.

- I've never done a civvy bootcamp. I don't think I could take it seriously enough :)

Reply

Chris Serong

2/28/2012 09:57:25 am

Thanks for your thoughts. I had a long chat with a friend recently, who was in the Army for a number of years. He spoke about the exercises he found rewarding, and the processes they went through, in a very interesting way - it sounds like you have similar experiences. He spoke about an exercise they'd do, in teams of five - one person would lie on the stretcher, and the others would carry it, one at each corner, for a long way. They'd swap roles as they went, and settle into a good jog, covering a lot of ground, and to me, it sounded like the ideal team-building exercise which required a good level of all-over coordination and conditioning.

I've never been in the Army, and I don't train people to be combat ready. I see a lot of trainers who look like they wish they were in the Army, and what I've seen of civilian bootcamps... Not sure they're my cup of tea.

There's an immediacy, or urgency, when your career involves threat to life and/or limb, that would change the dynamic of the demands you place on your body, and that would have a dramatic impact on the way you motivate yourself - when staying alive is dependent on your ability to get shit done well and quickly.

Really, the point of a lot of what I write about, is trying to encourage healthy exercise practices, and a healthy relationship with your body and exercise in general, that has the capacity to serve you for the long haul. And I like to come back to that - your exercise program should serve you, you don't serve the program.

But as with all things - context! What's important from person to person will vary vastly, depending on the demands that are placed upon us as individuals. Another friend of mine said she was training someone else for the Police fitness test. I meant to ask what was required, but never got around to it! I find the idea of standardised fitness tests interesting when under the weight of very real professional performance and safety issues, rather than y'know, that 13 minute jog they make you do in grade 7.

Reply

karelys

7/24/2012 06:53:12 am

It never occurred to me that pain = there's something wrong but we ignore it once you go in the gym. No wonder I dreaded the gym so much at times!

Reply

Chris Serong

7/24/2012 12:21:10 pm

We're so used to thinking that we're not training enough, that we forget it's possible to overtrain, as if that's something that's reserved only for athletes - if we've even heard of such a thing!

The thing is - whether or not you're overtraining has nothing to do with how close you are to your goals. And we're told, that for weight loss, we've just gotta be pushing it harder and harder, which is clearly not something I buy into.

For me, it all comes down to awareness and investigation. You can't expect training to be delightful all the time, but you sure as hell don't want it to be painful all the time. That's the problem with masochism, a lot of us get hooked on this feeling of purification, that we can improve ourselves by enduring hardship. There's something in it - enduring hardship makes us stronger, or it can make us weaker - but enduring hardship at the gym isn't the same as developing life skills because you've come to terms with the nature of chaos.... Hmmm.

The other thing that keeps coming up is anxiety - the physical signs of anxiety are the same for exercise. If you suffer anxiety attacks, the way to train right for you, sure as hell isn't to press yourself to have an anxiety attack! All training, when undertaken gently, is good for you too - I think moreso than forced training, where you're pushing beyond your capacity too far. If you do want to exceed your potential, you still need to respect your limits. Failure to do so often results in injury, illness, or other setbacks. So y'know, balance in all things...